An Ultra-Wideband Sensing Board for Radio Frequency Front-End in Iot Transmitters
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electronics Article An Ultra-Wideband Sensing Board for Radio Frequency Front-End in IoT Transmitters Alessandra Petrocchi 1,2, Antonio Raffo 2,*, Gianni Bosi 2 , Gustavo Avolio 3, Davide Resca 4, Giorgio Vannini 2 and Dominique Schreurs 1 1 Department of Electrical Engineering (ESAT), KU Leuven, 3001 Leuven, Belgium; [email protected] (A.P.); [email protected] (D.S.) 2 Department of Engineering, University of Ferrara, 44122 Ferrara, Italy; [email protected] (G.B.); [email protected] (G.V.) 3 Anteverta-mw B.V., 5656AE Eindhoven, The Netherlands; [email protected] 4 Microwave Electronics for Communications, MEC S.r.l, 40127 Bologna, Italy; [email protected] * Correspondence: antonio.raff[email protected] Received: 9 September 2019; Accepted: 15 October 2019; Published: 19 October 2019 Abstract: The upcoming technologies related to Internet of Things will be characterized by challenging requirements oriented toward the most efficient exploitation of the energy in electronic systems. The use of wireless communications in these devices makes this aspect particularly important, since the performance of radio transceivers is strongly dependent on the environmental conditions affecting the antenna electrical characteristics. The use of circuits capable of adapting themselves to the actual state of the environment can be a valuable solution, provided that the implemented sensing features have negligible impact on the overall performance and cost of the system. In this work, we present the design and verification of an innovative ultra-wideband sensing board to detect real-time variations of the antenna impedance in transmitters oriented to Internet of Things applications. The proposed sensing board was widely validated by means of small- and large-signal measurements carried out at microwave frequencies. Keywords: six-port junction; ultra-wideband; Internet of Things 1. Introduction Internet of Things (IoT) has become more and more common nowadays in the research community. Starting from [1,2], where the main concepts of IoT were addressed, the research around this topic has grown and, consequently, additional details have been defined about the requirements (e.g., low cost, energy efficiency, broad bandwidth). The basic idea about IoT is that things or objects become smart, which means that they obtain the ability to interact with each other and work together, even exploiting the capabilities of the internet network. The innovation regarding IoT is not necessarily related to the development of new electronic systems but also to the need to adapt existing systems by adding these smart functionalities. IoT devices will be used in applications for our daily life at home or in the industry. For instance, home devices include smart TVs, speakers, wearables, and smart appliances, whereas technologies dedicated to security systems and to sensor and monitor traffic or weather are dedicated to the industry [3]. The communication between devices can be delegated to common standards, such as multiband WLAN [4,5], although ultra-wideband (UWB) transmissions are nowadays spreading out as an effective solution, especially for short-range communications [6–9]. Their use is defined by strict regulations, since they exploit bandwidths already used by other services and applications and, therefore, the transmitted power must be limited to avoid any interference. For example, the US and Electronics 2019, 8, 1191; doi:10.3390/electronics8101191 www.mdpi.com/journal/electronics Electronics 2019, 8, 1191 2 of 16 European regulations allow UWB transmissions from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz with a maximum power of 41 dBm/Hz over a bandwidth of at least 500 MHz or 20% of the center frequency [9,10]. − Due to the vastness of possible applications, IoT capabilities should be integrated in low-cost objects and deployed under a huge variety of conditions. An important goal will be to equip these devices with the capability to adapt themselves according to the actual operating condition, in order to provide stable performance regardless of any environmental variation. Considering the radio communication environment for the aforementioned applications, the antenna near-field may change drastically in real operating conditions, and this will affect the antenna input impedance. This variation has the strongest impact at the transmitter side (composed of an antenna, a radio frequency (RF) front-end, and digital signal processing), especially on the RF front-end (e.g., power amplifier (PA)). Indeed, the antenna load variation jeopardizes the PA performance, for example, through reducing efficiency, gain, and linearity. In addition, a strong mismatch condition may have a considerable and detrimental impact on the system reliability, since it could lead to the active devices in the PA being close to their maximum rating specifications [11,12]. This is not the first time that this problem has been faced. Indeed, several approaches have been proposed in the literature to solve the mismatch problem between the PA and the antenna, including enhancement of the circuit architecture [13], reconfigurable matching networks [14], and signal adaptation. These approaches are not all compatible with IoT requirements: for example, making the circuit design more robust by means of an isolator would create additional losses which are not in line with the energy-efficiency goal of IoT. In this work, we will assume the PA is an off-the-shelf component, having no tight specifications in terms of robustness to load variations. We also assume that the load presented to the PA can be adjusted in real time by means of a reconfigurable matching network (RMN) (Figure1). In this scenario, the possibility of monitoring the RF front-end load condition to possibly compensate for load variations by means of the RMN is a crucial aspect for maximizing the overall performance of the system. RMNs can be implemented by using different technologies, such as switches, to select between stubs [15] or capacitors [16], microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) [17], and semiconductor varactors [18,19]. Whatever the choice, sensing of the antenna impedance is required in order to properly tune the RMN. To achieve this, multiple techniques have been proposed in the literature. The most common solutions can be divided into two main groups: those focusing on monitoring the amplitude only and with narrowband specification, and those with phase information and broadband implementation [20,21]. However, both approaches are not compatible with IoT devices. The first is not suitable because of the need for vectorial information over a large bandwidth. The second, despite being broadband, adopts a quadrature down converter which creates additional losses and power consumption. Another example is a commercial gain/phase detector [18,22] to acquire the reflection coefficient of the antenna. Being an active device, it requires a DC supply, which is clearly not suitable for low-cost high-efficiency applications. In this paper, the proposed approach consists of an ultra-wideband passive network able to detect the load variations in terms of both amplitude and phase. It is based on a six-port junction [23,24], which is a passive structure. It has been designed to achieve a bandwidth of 1 GHz, i.e., from 5 to 6 GHz, covering the unlicensed national infrastructure (U-NII) radio bands, the 5 GHz Wi-Fi band, and to be suitable for 802.11ac Wi-Fi access points (ACs). The availability of such a large bandwidth is a great advantage in terms of the possible applications, since it can be used to accommodate different services using the same RF front-end and antenna system, e.g., UWB localization [25] with 5-GHz WLAN capabilities for data transmission. To our best knowledge, this is the first time that such a kind of device is presented for an IoT wideband RF transmitter application. This paper is organized as follows. In Section2, the six-port junction and the detector topology and design are explained as well as the fabrication procedure. In Section3, the sensing board performance is validated by means of measurements. The fabricated device will be tested not only to verify Electronics 2019, 8, 1191 3 of 16 itsElectronics capability 2019, 8 to, x FOR achieve PEER theREVIEW correct impedance information but also in terms of nonlinearity3 of and 16 bandwidth. Finally, in Section4, some conclusions will be drawn. Electronics 2019, 8, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 16 Figure 1. Simplified block scheme of a transmitter. 2. Sensing Board Design Figure 1. SimplifiedSimplified block scheme of a transmitter. 2. Sensing The block Board scheme Design of the proposed sensing technique for the detection of the front-end load impedance variations is shown in Figure 2. The six-port junction [23,24] solution has been chosen The block scheme of the proposed sensing techniquetechnique for the detection of the front-end load because it is simple to construct, low-cost, meets broadband requirements, and does not require any impedance variations is shown in FigureFigure2 2.. TheThe six-portsix-port junctionjunction [[23,24]23,24] solution has been chosen power supply. All of these aspects are compatible with IoT devices. The concept behind this passive because it is simple to construct, low-cost, meetsmeets broadband requirements, and does not require any structure is well-known in the literature [23,24], and it has already been used in various microwave power supply. All of these aspectsaspects areare compatiblecompatible withwith IoTIoT devices.devices.